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CONFLICT STYLE · DUTCH

Free Conflict Style Test

The five ways people handle disagreement — problem solving, compromising, forcing, yielding, and avoiding — from a published scale whose items you can check. No best style, and not a hiring tool.

What a conflict style test measures

A conflict style assessment measures which strategies a person tends to use when they disagree with someone. The Dutch Test for Conflict Handling (DUTCH) measures five strategies derived from Dual Concern Theory, which describes conflict behaviour as the product of concern for one's own outcomes and concern for the other party's: problem solving, compromising, forcing, yielding, and avoiding. Its authors describe it as a measure of behavioural intentions rather than observed behaviour.

That last clause is the one most conflict-style tests leave out. A questionnaire cannot watch you disagree with your manager; it can only ask what you would say you do. The authors of this scale are explicit about it, and everything on this page is built around the distinction rather than around it.

The five strategies

Each is scored from four items and each is the right answer to some conflicts. There is no ranking between them, and a test that gives you one is not measuring anything the theory supports.

Problem solving

SELF HIGH · OTHERS HIGH

Working the issue until both sides' interests are actually served, rather than trading positions.

Works when: the relationship continues after the disagreement and the underlying interests are not actually opposed.

Compromising

SELF MODERATE · OTHERS MODERATE

Looking for the middle: both sides give a little, and the split is roughly even.

Works when: time is short, the stakes are moderate, and a workable answer now beats an optimal one later.

Forcing

SELF HIGH · OTHERS LOW

Pressing your own position — arguing, holding a line, and playing to win the outcome.

Works when: the matter is genuinely non-negotiable, speed is decisive, or someone has to hold a line that others are relying on.

Yielding

SELF LOW · OTHERS HIGH

Giving way to the other party's wishes, goals, and interests.

Works when: you care much less than they do, you were wrong, or the relationship matters more than this particular outcome.

Avoiding

SELF LOW · OTHERS LOW

Staying away from the confrontation — playing differences down, or not letting them surface.

Works when: the issue is genuinely trivial, emotions need time to cool, or you have no standing to resolve it.

Dual Concern Theory

The five strategies are not an arbitrary list. They are the corners and centre of a two-axis grid: how much you are concerned with your own outcomes, and how much with the other party's. High on both is problem solving; high on self and low on others is forcing; the reverse is yielding; low on both is avoiding; moderate on both is compromising.

That structure is why the DUTCH exists. The instruments that came before it derived their scales empirically and then described them in the theory's language; this one was written from the theory outward, which is also why the five-factor structure holds up when it is tested.

Why the DUTCH and not the TKI

The Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument is the better-known measure of this territory. It is also a commercial instrument whose items are not published, which means no independent implementation of it can be checked — including any free "TKI-style" quiz you find online, which is at best someone's impression of the real thing.

The DUTCH measures the same five strategies from the same underlying theory, and its twenty items are printed in the appendix of a peer-reviewed paper anyone can read. This test administers those items verbatim. It is not the TKI, it does not reproduce the TKI, and it does not report TKI modes.

What this test will not do

It will not tell you which style is best, because none is. It will not rank you against other people — the five scales are scored independently against their own ranges, with no norms and no percentiles. And it will not give you a reading precise enough to act on small differences: four items per scale, with Cronbach's alpha between 0.65 and 0.73 in the source study, means gaps under about 10 points are inside the noise.

It is also not a selection or evaluation instrument. The DUTCH has not been validated for hiring, promotion, assignment, or performance review, and there is no research supporting its use that way. Used in a selection process it is unfair to candidates and a legal exposure for the employer — and it is easy to answer strategically when something is riding on the result, which is exactly the situation in a hiring process.

What it is good for is narrower and more useful: shared language for a disagreement that has already happened. Being able to say "I went straight to compromise there, and I should have asked what you actually needed" is worth more to a team than any profile of who is which type.

COMMON QUESTIONS

Conflict style questions, answered

Is this the Thomas-Kilmann (TKI) assessment?

No. The TKI is a commercial, licensed instrument whose items are not published, so it cannot be implemented or checked by anyone outside its publisher. The DUTCH measures the same five strategies from the same underlying theory, and its twenty items are printed in the appendix of a peer-reviewed paper you can read. This test reports DUTCH scales, not TKI modes, and the two are not interchangeable.

Which conflict style is the best one?

None of them, and any test that tells you otherwise is selling something. Each of the five is the right answer to some situations: forcing when a line genuinely has to hold, yielding when you care less than they do, avoiding when emotions need to cool, compromising when time is short, problem solving when the interests are not actually opposed. The useful half of this result is usually the strategy you almost never reach for, because that is the class of situation you are likely handling with the wrong tool.

Can my employer use this to evaluate me?

No. The DUTCH is not validated for selection, promotion, assignment, or performance evaluation, and using it that way is unfair to the individual and a legal exposure for the employer. What it is genuinely good for is giving a team shared language after a disagreement — making it possible to say 'I went straight to compromise and I should not have' without it becoming an argument about character.

Does this measure what I actually do in a conflict?

Not quite, and the scale's authors say so directly: they describe the DUTCH as a measure of behavioural intentions rather than actual behaviour. Sometimes intentions translate into behaviour and sometimes they do not. The gap is widest for avoiding — in the original negotiation study, self-reported avoiding did not correlate with what observers or opponents actually saw, largely because avoiding is defined by things not happening.

My five scores are all about the same. What does that mean?

Usually one of two things: you genuinely vary your approach by situation, which is a reasonable way to handle conflict, or you answered at a fairly even level throughout. The result page says which strategies came out on top but tells you not to read the ordering as a ranking when the spread is small. With four items per scale and reliabilities in the .65-.73 range, gaps under about 10 points are inside the instrument's noise.

Why are the scores not out of 100 between them?

Because these are five independent scales, not a distribution. Each one is scored as a percentage of its own range, so scoring high on problem solving does not require scoring low on forcing, and the five do not sum to anything. Instruments that force your styles to add up to a fixed total are measuring something different — a ranking of your styles against each other rather than each one on its own.

SOURCES

Where this test comes from

  1. [1]
    De Dreu, C. K. W., Evers, A., Beersma, B., Kluwer, E. S., & Nauta, A. (2001). A theory-based measure of conflict management strategies in the workplace. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22(6), 645–668. ↗

    The source of the 20 items, the five-scale keying, the response anchors, and the stem, all reproduced verbatim from Appendix A. Cronbach's alpha in the expanded five-scale study ran from .65 (yielding) to .73 (avoiding); those figures are shown on the result page rather than hidden, because they set the limit on how finely the five scores can be read.

  2. [2]
    Pruitt, D. G., & Rubin, J. Z. (1986). Social conflict: Escalation, stalemate, and settlement. Random House. ↗

    Dual Concern Theory, the framework the DUTCH is built on and the source of the two-axis placement of each strategy shown on the result page. The placements are the theory's; this instrument scores the five strategies and does not separately measure the two concerns.

  3. [3]
    Van de Vliert, E., & Kabanoff, B. (1990). Toward theory-based measures of conflict management. Academy of Management Journal, 33(1), 199–209. ↗

    Why a theory-based measure was built at all. This paper's critique of the existing conflict-style questionnaires — that their scales were derived empirically rather than from the theory they claimed to measure — is the argument the DUTCH was written to answer.